Longbow(s)

A bow might be a deadly weapon in a skilled mans hand, but its not too usefull against heavy infantry with shields. Without the stakes and bad weather the english bowman at agincourt would never have beaten the french knights.

About the firearms discussion,
A weapon beeing able to kill people by penetrating their shields and their armour and inflicting huge wounds (The first firearms used quite big bullets, often made of lead causing deadly poisoning) is much more frightening than arrows which you can absorb which your shields. (Or at least have the illuson about it). Another point is the space bowman need to have. Firearms mad close shooting formations possible.

Originally Posted by seienchin

About the firearms discussion,
A weapon beeing able to kill people by penetrating their shields and their armour and inflicting huge wounds (The first firearms used quite big bullets, often made of lead causing deadly poisoning) is much more frightening than arrows which you can absorb which your shields. (Or at least have the illuson about it). Another point is the space bowman need to have. Firearms mad close shooting formations possible.

Quick note about the lead poisoning, lead isn't some sort of deadly poison, it increases chances of birth defects. The reason lead bullets are so deadly is the combination of the deformation of the projectile, which produces much larger wound channels. Odds are most of the post battle deaths were caused by infection as opposed to "lead poisoning" (look at the massive infection death toll for the US Civil War). And early firearms needed quite a bit of space, being giant chucks of firespitting metal laible to explode if mishandled.

The thing that causes concern about lead even today is of bullets corroding and the lead finding its way into the ground water. Lead takes a while to kill you but the thing is that heavy metal build up inside of organisms is virtually impossible to get rid of. So a little bit over a long enough period of time will screw you up quite badly.

Yeah... battlefield clean up is very expensive. Now back to the topic!

If there is archeological evidence than I see no reason why not to include it, though I doubt the longbows there would be as effective as heralded.

Here is a nice compormise, as the M2TW engine allows for multiple weapon skins, simply include an occasional longbow in the formation, odds are performance was not that much more exceptional than a standard hunting bow used by drafted hunters.

I agree with what Khorack and -42- have said. The longbow is not necessarily more powerful and it's definitely not any more armor piercing than other bows; it is just a more efficient design. This means that a longer bow pulling 50 lbs. will shoot an arrow faster than a shorter one with an identical draw weight. I would also like to point out again that shorter bows can be made just as efficient with the right design elements, such as recurving the limbs.

If the Sweboz were given longbows like I suggested that wouldn't really mean that there stats would need to be changed, because they used hunting bows which would have had much lower draw weights than war bows. I just feel like that is the kind of bows the ancient Germans would have used based on the evidence I have found. If the EB team doesn't agree with me I completely understand; I'm no historian and I came up with the idea while in the middle of writing my original reply

I can never resist putting in two penneth when longbows come up.

IIRC weren't the neolithic bows of of a flat D crossection which makes them more powerful than the more standard type but more complex to make and therefore the sort of specialist kit a hunter would use.

I agree with "shadeswolf" in that the French etc were unwilling to arm a large section of the lower orders with a lethal weapon, when it gets to firearms this changes because the weapon and it's ammunition become so much more complex and expensive that only the state can provide and resupply them in significant numbers.

And finally before everything dissolves in to pull weights and penetration I believe the English victories of the 14th 15th century are not due to the longbow as a weapon itself but the whole army being a weapon sytem in itself a fine balance of the logbowmen and men at arms, the real killers being the semi-professional, war hardened dismounted men at arms who for a century had no peers in Europe. It would be quite interesting, if the figures exsisted, to see who inflicted the most fatalities at Crecy, Poitiers etc, my money is on the men at arms.

So we may get a new unit "Proto-Welsh Longbowmen" whatever, as the local AOR of British Islands

Now seriously, if we gonna include longbowmen mechanic in EB 2, we should give some units "longbowmen" status, such as Hindus Pattiyodha and Kovakasi Netadzik, as they also got huge bow with them. But the question is simple, are that "big-bows" have armour piercing capability or not?

There is a reason why they were so large. Bamboo isn't very good bow material, but where in India would you find Yew?

All you would need a yew like wood with the same rigid to soft gradient. In lieu of that similar types of bows were built out of a lamination of of hard wood and bamboo - somewhat a hybrid in the shape of a longbow but with the construction similar to a composite bow. This site sells bows made with the traditional methods and gives a brief description of the construction method:

http://www.krackow.com/asia.html

Now, what's really interesting was when I looked at the Wikipedia article, it mentioned bows made out of Wootz Steel. Now they were starting to make steel at this point but I'm not certain what period those bows are from. I'd be very interested in hearing from an expert on those:

http://www.archeryhistory.com/longbo.../drawings1.jpg
Its #4.

The longbow is an old weapon, but it only became famous because of the way in which England used it. The 'history of the longbow' as people tend to know it is not so much a history of the weapon itself, as a history of how the Hundred Years War started to bring back professional standing armies and the societal evolutions that had been occurring for this to even be possible. England was also blessed with a long period of excellent, sometimes even exceptional battlefield commanders, while the French had been blessed with an unending plethora of colossal idiots who, in the only explanation I can come up with to justify it, resented the dogged bravery of their own troops so much they couldn't bring themselves to do anything but get the poor ******** killed.

Frankly, the longbow is not truly that exceptional when taken entirely on its own, although the myth is not quite so epic as the katana lie. They're certainly no more 'armour piercing' than any other bow with a similar draw weight. No bow should be considered 'armour piercing' above and beyond whatever attack value they have already been assigned in the game. Powerful bows will have a higher attack value than weaker ones, it's that simple; none of them are any more explicitly 'armour piercing' than any other, since the piercing mechanics of how they remain effective against padded armour, maille, and any gaps in rigid armour is endemic to any bow by default with the only difference being, ta daaa, how fast and how big the arrow they're firing is (for the most part).

A small note on the supposed downpour weakening Italian X-bows more than English longbows.
29th October at a historical congress in Cph on something else I chanced to learn that experiments with submerging X-bow strings in water for 24 hours before using them showed no difference in performance to dry ones. Likely the poor Genoese used that explanation as one of many to explain how the volleys of English arrows mowed them down while they could not reach the longbowmen placed on a hill with their own arrows.

IMO the explanation is more likely:
1. sheer volume of arrows, the longbow has a higher rate of fire by far.
2. better range from the hilltop.
3. The Genoese had not brought their pavises to hide behind.

Anyway, this hints at why the English archers were so effective, they were trained for a lifetime to mass-fire volleys and their sheer volume of fire was incredible. Further, they used the armour-piercing bodkin arrows, which earlier archers did not. Both these developments only happened after the Welsh bloodily demonstrated how scaringly effective longbows were.

Now, the army bog finds from Denmark has yielded longbows, but not many compared to the number of spears and even swords- only in one of them are there lots ow arrowpoints AFAIR, so perhaps massed archery with longbows did not play a large role in Germanic warfare.

Rather we can turn to the situation 1000 years later as decribed in our first medieval sources purpotedly telling of prehistory, Viking Age and their own Early middle age.

Now whether we see them as relating truthfully the stories of the Germanic Iron Age and Viking Age, or (as later artists depicting New Testament events did so with them wearing full plate etc), is not so important here. What the Sagas and Saxo relates is that archery was more comparable to current day snipers than mass weapons.

Let me present a piece of Olav Trygvessons Saga, written by Snorri.
At The Battle of Svold where Sven Tveskæg (Forkbeard), Olaf of Sweden and Erik Haakonsson, Norwegian earl in opposition to Olav Trygvesson confronted him in a battle and clears his warships one by one (clearing a ship in the Viking terminology means boarding and killing everything). No one can board the Royal ship; the famously huge "Ormen hin Lange" (The Long Wyrm/Dragon) as long as Einar Tambarskjelve shoots his huge bow "Tambar". From this high vantage point he can pick off everyone that tries until Erik Haakonsson gets his "Finnish" (Samii) archer to shoot back*.

Einar shot an arrow at Earl Eirik, which hit the tiller end just above the earl's head so hard that it entered the wood up to the arrow-shaft. The earl looked that way, and asked if they knew who had shot; and at the same moment another arrow flew between his hand and his side, and into the stuffing of the chief's stool, so that the barb stood far out on the other side. Then said the earl to a man called Fin, -- but some say he was of Fin (Laplander) race, and was a superior archer, -- "Shoot that tall man by the mast." Fin shot; and the arrow hit the middle of Einar's bow just at the moment that Einar was drawing it, and the bow was split in two parts. "What is that", cried King Olaf, "that broke with such a noise?" "Norway, king, from thy hands," cried Einar. "No! not quite so much as that," says the king; "take my bow, and shoot," flinging the bow to him. Einar took the bow, and drew it over the head of the arrow. "Too weak, too weak," said he, "for the bow of a mighty king!" and, throwing the bow aside, he took sword and shield, and fought valiantly.

It is, BTW, interesting to see how the 13th century struggles of Norway vs Denmark and Sweden is reflected in ethnocentric bias, just as the Danish ones against the Holy Roman Empire is in Saxo.
Anyway, there are many stories such at that in various King- and Family Sagas, Saxo, etc., Gunnar of Hlidarendi for example, holds off his attackers by archery and is a famous archer. So we can conclude that in as much as the written sources reflect the real situation and are not just emphasising the prowess of a few great men (which they also do), archery was more of a sniper-ish nature.
However, there is at least one instance where archers in more numerous nature is present, last battle of Harald Hildetand at Bråvalla where amongst other things, archers from Telemarken take down the hero Ubbe of Friesland.

That leaves us little to conclude upon really, and my tentative interpretation would be that massed archers could play a role, but that only specialists such as Finn, Ejnar, Palnatoke, Gunnar and the men of Telemarken (but not Olav Trygvesson) employ the warbow/longbow and has specialised training with it.

*interestingly enough the most famous and highest scoring sniper we know off is a Finn, Simo Häyä 522 kills in 96 days of The Winter War, and Saxo describes the Finns as using basically the same tactics in Viking times as they employed in 1939...

Originally Posted by Macilrille

Further, they used the armour-piercing bodkin arrows, which earlier archers did not. Both these developments only happened after the Welsh bloodily demonstrated how scaringly effective longbows were.

Maybe in the West. Finds indicate that the Kidarites/early Turks etc. used different kinds of arrows in different regions, depending on their enemies' preferred amount of armour. Western Turks used many bodkin type arrows, because they were up against the Persians, who placed emphasis on heavily armoured contingents.

Again, hardly. Bow-toting Europeans were no fools, and understood perfectly well that you wanted different arrowheads for different purposes. This is as true for the designs used for hunting as for war. Case in point, the Viking arrowheads found around Dublin include several types very clearly designed primarily for armour penetration - indeed the spike-like "bodkin" types form a clear majority of the finds. Not dissimilarly many of the (few) Carolingian arrowheads discovered on the Continent are of a rhomboid shape - which isn't quite as dedicated "anti-armour" design as the "bodkin" types, but certainly far more so than the broadheads used for hunting (and sometimes, in war, against horses and unarmoured soldiers).

Yeah, it seems that in most societies, your average bowmen would usually carry several types of arrows around. This feature is most distinctive in Nomad societies though.